Forget Botox! This Guy Thinks Your Crow's Feet Are Sexy

Maybe you're out there. Maybe you're moving past me at the mall or walking past me on the street, your re-constructed face looking all-natural and glowing, and I have no idea about it. I look at you as we pass and I say to myself, "Now THERE is a beautiful woman who hasn't been knifed or needle-d!"

But I doubt it.

The truth is (and I hate to be harsh but harsh is all we've got sometimes): this whole epidemic of plastic surgery and Botox and whatever the hell else people do anymore to try and hold on to their youthful tones, it's all a con/a sham/a money grab. Its snake oil, ya'll, and it doesn’t work worth a damn.

A few nights a week I'll be watching TV with my signature pint glass full of cheap Chianti and out of nowhere, I get a little buzz on and I'm whipping through the channels all indecisive, the fast-paced flicking and momentary flashes of everything bouncing down off of the satellite into my little living room. Before long, I wind up face-to-face with someone, someone with an actual paying gig on television, whose face looks like someone slathered a wad of hot Napalm butter on it. Shiny and stiff, like a neon sign advertising Martian masks. They stand there in front of the camera smiling/trying to smile, seemingly unaware that, quite frankly, they've mastered the 'look' of a cellophane-wrapped murder victim.

Ugh. I hate plastic surgery so much that I punch myself in the temple.

Why do people (especially a lot of women who are already very pretty) buy into this notion that shape-shifting/altering their face resembles any reasonable semblance of normality? Because let me tell you: it's not normal. Seriously.

I'd surmise we're maybe 20 years out from instant hologram installation, a very expensive but extremely believable medical procedure in which they'll simply replace your entire face with a hologram when you reach that desperate junction in life when you feel that unexplicable tug to look like a teenager again. We're not there yet though, people, so sit tight and form a line around the block.

All of this messing with your face in the name of pure vanity is still pretty much hovering around the level of MEDIEVAL DARK AGES. You pay your money, you get lasered/scissored/injected/inflated/skin-flap-lifted/plastic-cheekbone-slithered, and you come out looking as if a nuclear pigeon shat a half-pound of poison mayo down on your cheek. There's no tip-toeing around it, my friends; there are no 'fabulous' surgeons, and I don't care what Hollywood tells you or how many people are paying big money to smile the kind of smile where nothing physical appears to happen. Because here's the truth: 97% of the people who get those kind of procedures done to the most visible part of their anatomy end up slathered and deep-fried in a whole lot of WTF.

And you know what? It's high time somebody called them on it. Maybe we can save a few beautiful people from themselves. I mean it; let's get real before it's too late! I want to save some crow's feet and godd*mnit, I want to help preserve a few laugh lines before I die! And speaking of, when did crow's feet suddenly become not hot?

The other night I watched James Gandolfini's last movie, Enough Said. Great flick, do yourself the favor. But what made me want to wrap the thing up in a tortilla and eat it like a damn carne asada burrito was one Miss Julia-Louis Dreyfus. Oh my God/be still my heart. Here's a very pretty woman by any account — not a super model — but a very pretty woman who's allowed herself to age fairly naturally, from what I can tell. She had these little crow's feet around her eyes and I felt my the bonfire inside me flaring up in my chest. There was something so sexy about the fact that this woman's face was her own, and that it showed, and that she was okay with that and always had been. That confidence is so attractive. It oozes wisdom and character, and it's classy and real.

I see as many gorgeous women each day as the next guy. I spot them in the bar and down in the college town and in cyberspace all day long. But I'm rarely giddy about any of them. What passes for beauty has become a bit generic and same-y. And yet, here I was: smitten by the enchanting crow-footed face of a woman who appears quite comfortable in her own skin. A woman who, even if she shows signs of aging, doesn't appear to give a rat's ass about trying to swap her mug for a space alien's.

And hot damn, when a pretty lady smiles and the laugh lines show around her mouth, am I the only guy alive who wants to buy her an eggnog-latte on a frosty New England morning while we hold hands and watch the fishing boats move toward the sea?

Listen, I'm a realist and I know I'm nothing too special. I can be an idiot and an ass and I'm no kind of catch for any woman, except one who needs a place to crash for the night when her high-heels are busted and she's had one too many and she just wants a couch and a friend.

But I'll be damned if anyone anywhere on this green Earth could tell me that I don't understand what makes a woman truly beautiful.

And because of that, I think I'm onto something big and important here, something worth thinking about in these waning, fading hours of laugh lines and crow's feet, in these disappearing days of early morning sunbeams slipping through the blinds to land on the cheek of a woman, still sleeping, whose face does not, God forbid, look like an inflatable Chinese blow-up doll.